HOTMAIL AND YAHOO WERE HACKED…

One reads about Web site security problems in newspaper almost weekly. Home page of numerous organizations has been attacked and replaced by a new home page of the crackers’ choosing. The popular press calls people who break into computers “hackers”, but many programmers reserve threat term for great programmers. They prefer to call these people crackers.
In 1999, a Swedish cracker broke into Microsoft’s Hotmail Web site and created a mirror site that allowed anyone to type in the name of a Hotmail user and then read all of the person’s current and archived e-mail. Sites that have been cracked include Yahoo, the U.S. Army, the CIA, NASA, and New York Times.
In another case, a 19-year-old Russian cracker named Maxim broke into an e-commerce Web site and stole 300,000 credit card numbers. Then he approached the site owners and told them that if they did not pay him $100,000, he would post all the credit card numbers to the Internet. They did not give in to his blackmail, and he indeed posted the credit card numbers, inflicting great damage to many innocent victims.
In a different vein, a 23-year-old California student e-mailed a press release to a news agency falsely stating that the Emulex Corporation was going to post a large quarterly loss and that the C.E.O. was resigning immediately. Within hours, the company’s stock dropped by 60%, causing stockholders to lose over $2 billion. The perpetrator made a quarter of a million dollars by selling the stock short just before sending the announcement. While this event was not a Web site break-in, it is clear that putting such an announcement on the home page of any big corporation would have a similar effect.